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Great article that articulates some sentiments that have been percolating in the back of my mind, as well.

Nice write-up! I saw some earlier posts were submitted here, but not that one - so I tried submitting it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48686947

But you couldn't yourself email the agent from your phone (for example) and receive a response via email?

I can't immediately think of what a useful shader test would look like (beyond perhaps, shader doesn't crash program) - if this is something worth discussing, it would probably be useful to see some real world shader code; perhaps especially two versions of the same shader as it evolve.

I don't generally test css code to check that a background is now indeed set to "a more mauvey shade of pinky-russet" after a change - but I might want to.

I might at least want to run a test with browser automation to check that any text is readable on the background.

I could at least find an example of looking at the rendered page for text (as opposed to in the DOM); Google AI had some ideas of how to check the contrast in a screenshot - but no idea if that would actually work as written.

https://medium.com/@dzianisv/vibe-engineering-testing-browse...

https://share.google/aimode/mW8ClhqGppfpovRrE

I'm not familiar with shaders and game engines, so I'm not sure what you are saying.

I had a quick look at godot tests, and seems to me they cover some parts of the shaders?

Anyway, I was more wondering who/how people are dogmatic about TDD, and manage to leave out one out of three core concepts from red/green/refactor ?

TDD dogma of only writing code to fix broken tests.

Isn't red-green-refactor pretty ingrained in TDD?

Only write code to make a failing test pass; then refactor while making sure the tests still pass?

Then write a test that fails, repeat?

Looks like op mostly a rehash of the linked Wired story?

https://www.wired.com/2002/02/mitnick-meets-his-pigeon/

https://archive.is/oMcKd

Having read and enjoyed ghost in the wires (and at some point all of mitnicks books) - I still enjoy the infamous takedown movie. I think it still shows a lot of mindset around social engineering - and realistic holes in security measures. I do understand why a lot of people were pissed off, though.

Ed: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/

Ed2: can't recall if I ever got around to reading takedown - I think I did. Much prefer ghost in the wires.

If that tickled you, I also recommend "The New New Thing" by Michael M. Lewis.

Not from off state, though? Granted I still expect the iphone to boot quicker than 20 seconds.

(2010)?

... Via netboot.xyz?

https://netboot.xyz/docs/selfhosting/

Even if self hosted?

https://netboot.xyz/docs/selfhosting/

They already are Cyberdyne Systems IRL?

https://en.hyundai-wia.com/business/defense_business.asp

https://en.hyundai-wia.com/business/defense_business.asp

it keeps your app and data in one place (I remember having some issue with this at the time, though I can't remember what the actual issue was)

CORS headers?

Correction - not "my" but "mu" (mail utils):

https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/

Btw, anyone still reading/participating mailing lists? From MacOS? Have you found a reasonable client?

I'm not even going to try with Outlook.

Surprisingly good is a stretch. Barley adequate more like it.

Now that they've hidden mail access behind oauth (imap and SMTP, additionally SMTP behind global default off policy) and graph api behind oauth2 - it looks like they don't have to worry about real mail clients competing.

Actually fighting [f] to get mail in/out working with freescout right now - and having had learn more than I care to about o365 and PowerShell etc - I wonder how hard it would be to write a couple of stand alone tools to get fetch/send/sync mail working with o365 and local maildir - to get my/sup/any sane Mua to really work with o365/exchange/outlook.

Then there's calendar and teams to deal with..

[f] Thankfully our o365 reseller does most of the fighting - I'm happy to not have tenant-wide admin in AD/entra/whatever kerberized LDAP is called today.

The 30% assume gross, pre tax income - not net.

Ed: obviously the 50/30/20 rule sums to 100% so would need to be net - although the US is weirdly treating health insurance as a "premium service" that go into the 50% here, not into taxes like in a modern society.

Write one (system) to throw away...

How so? Let's say that over a year, a given section of code needs to be read and understood once a month. Taking some time to keep the code succinct and free of distraction will increase productivity all those occasions, as well as the rest of the lifetime of the system. Say the next decade.

How is that not efficient?

Great article. I'm not sure the author is correct - but I think something is happening to the adage:

A sufficiently detailed specification is runnable code.

In a way I think LLMs will enable the dream of 4gl and "sufficiently smart compilers"[c].

LLMs aren't smart, but they are capable. Especially capable of translation and transformation.

I can certainly see them help move the abstraction horizon at which we work - so that rigid high level descriptions of the desired logic/process along with the process for quality testing - become the relevant curated artifacts - and the generated go/rust/java/python/etc code become incidental and mutable; subject to constant rewriting as part of the deployment of systems.

[c] You know, the ones that take naive C/C++ and produce executables that fully leverage RISC/EPIC platforms to be better than CISC. See also: Intel Itanium

I'm not talking about a reference check by someone other than the author. You'd not put a reference in in the first place, that you hadn't read, since you couldn't formulate the text that relates to the reference?

Ed: thanks for the link - I hadn't seen that yet.

A human can then verify the ones with under 90% certainty.

How about the author actually reads the finished report a couple of times and checks all the references?

It really is the lowest bar - even lower maybe than running a spell check.

I guess everyone uses 20% percent of Jira - just a different 20% ... [1]

We're using GitHub for everything here, but was using Jira as an email first helpdesk.

Was hoping this was that - but apparently not at all.

We almost went with libredesk - but it's a little too simple (no merging tickets?). We're giving FreeScout a go - looks like we might need the oauth2 plugin to work with o365 mail ...

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.

-- Joel Splosky

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/technology/spacex-ipo-emp...

When I was a kid, my grandparents were involved in a pretty decent intercontinental floppy disk piracy ring. They would buy and clone software sold locally and send it forward and get copies of games in response. My parents ran a small business converting peoples university notes/recordings into well written essays. My grandparents had a PC with Prince of Persia, and as payment for my parents essay writing services one of their friends from Hong Kong used to come around and teach me how to play. See he couldn't speak or understand english very well, but he had memorised the potions you needed to drink to get past each level, and also the fighting technique of most of the bad guys.

Sounds like the summary of the opening chapter of a Bruce Sterling novel.

Love that your Hong Kong friend memorized the DRM codes.

Of course, DRM was no issue with a cracked copy of the game...

Well, there was stow/xstow...

https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/

https://xstow.sourceforge.net/

Since there was a recent thread on react compiler[r] - I wonder if adding/pushing the code through react compiler would help? (Assuming it's not already being used)

[r] Thread was about rewrite in rust, but it made me have a look at the purpose/claims made by the project - and fine-grained, automated memoization for speed seems central.

Drones might hunt down enemies running away from the target site, while a missile would only destroy the target - and those not abandoning their post?